 It's nice to be here. I'm Chris Blakesley from UW-Madison, Wisconsin. This is from University of New Mexico, as was introduced. So we are excited to be here and talk about mobile media and a project that has been going for about four years now. And actually about three years ago, members of our team were here discussing this project as it was just beginning. And so it's nice to be here and kind of give an update of what's happened and challenges we're facing now. The tone, the angle we really decided to take was to discuss sustainability issues that we're facing. This has been, our expectations have been exceeded, so so far it's been a successful open source project. And, you know, as we look back at what's happened, we see some key open events that have happened that we think are worth sharing. So we want to share those with you and also share what issues we're facing now, and you know, hopefully that can be a fruitful discussion. So there are four main things we want to, we're going to talk about. We want to describe, well, we're going to talk about why mobile, why we chose this as an area of inquiry. And then we want to talk about, describe ARIS, this tool, and then kind of give some background story of ARIS in terms of its mobile development. And then discuss these sustainability issues that I would think are worth talking about. Okay, so before I get started, I know there's at least one iPhone in the audience. If you want to go to the App Store and download ARIS, ARIS, that would be a great thing to do while you're sitting there. And then if you don't have an iPhone, you just got a laptop there, you might want to go to ariscames.org. Those are kind of our two main public frontends, and we'll discuss how they came up within our project a little bit later on. So the first thing is just to situate why mobile and kind of where we are. So why is kind of obvious? Mobile is freaking huge. I mean, just unbelievably huge. Soon we'll have more mobile phones on the planet than people. Very soon. This is of June 2011, according to Wikipedia. But in schools and in prisons, the most popular take on mobile is to ban and confiscate. Despite all the research, otherwise, as to what might be good. This is sort of the biggest picture of what's going on out there. It's not effective, and it's not a good idea. So the idea is to actually make things for mobile. And this is probably the most common sort of thing that we encounter in terms of seeing other people take on mobile. We like apps like this. We use them to find out when the buses are coming. But it's not what we do. We do crazy stuff. Let's see. This is supposed to be a big mess, because it is. But it's a lot of fun. And the reason why we're all working together, the two of us who are here and the other people who aren't in the room and the people we bring in to other projects that we'll be talking about later on, is because we find that mobile is a very exciting place to be. And one of the central things that ends up being super exciting about it is it allows us to interact with local place in brand new ways. Sometimes we'll attach phones to bikes. Sometimes we'll get a room full of middle schoolers and artists and have them in games together. Sometimes I'll make a game for students within a particular class. Sometimes we'll record birds. Chris, what else is up there that's crazy with it? Well, sometimes we'll have students make their own projects. Like in the Netherlands, students draw and create things, but then we'll put them in locations for other people to go through a story. We'll create panoramic images so that that kind of true augmented reality can hold up a tablet or phone and see something overlaid in the actual space you're looking at and contextualizing those in meaningful experiences. So we're kind of a loosely affiliated group of people who think sort of similarly about mobile. One of the things that came up, thanks to Dave Gangon, who had this idea as a class project at one point was to create a software tool that would help us in these investigations, in these implementations to bring us together, although not intentionally, but to give us a tool with which to ask these questions. And that's where ARES comes from. So ARES is sort of first and foremost this thing you can download from Napstore. It's a game engine for creating these outdoor experiences on your cell phone. And rather than trying to explain something that's kind of abstract and really complicated, and usually we have two hour workshops to get people into, Chris is just going to walk you through one of the things that has been developed for ARES that might be a little bit faster to get up and running on it. It's a situated documentary called Dow Day, originally written by Jim Matthews. Yeah, so Dow Day, the term that's kind of developed around this is a situated documentary. So I'm just going to walk you through the experience. I hear your phone. You're at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You're outside and you wonder, I wonder if anyone's made something here. So you open up ARES and you look and there's a game called Dow Day. So you click on it and it tells you this. The day is October 18, 1967. Vietnam War is happening and protests are happening on campus because Dow Chemical Company is there recruiting students. It's a company that also creates a name home using the word. So you are, your role is that you're a reporter. And your goal, initially you see a little cut scene and it tells you you need to go and talk to the editor to get your assignment. And so you look on your map, click the little map icon and you see your editors over there so you walk over and when you get there the phone vibrates and you see you have a conversation ready. And this is your editor and he tells you he gives you your goal. Your goal is you need to go and interview all these different individuals that represent different perspectives on this issue. So you interview a protester, interview a faculty, maybe interview somebody from Dow Day. And so you go on it along the way you're collecting primary documents, actual letters that were used and transpired on campus. You continue to walk around and when we found one of the most memorable moments of this experience is when you get to a point on Baston Hill which you think might be the next slide. And you see a video of protesters marching by the actual spot that you're standing in. And that's just something that's really compelling and interesting and makes that space that much more compelling. So you go through, you interview these people and it all kind of comes to that climax and there's actually conflict between police and protesters. And so that's the situated documentary of Dow Day. Jim Matthews who created this originally had it as part of a larger class experience where students would come and do these things and then they'd have this experience to draw on as they in class analyze these documents and have discussions about this issue. So that's the app. And it air stands for augmented reality for interactive storytelling. And so the other end is not just sort of hearing the stories, being the position of playing Dow Day but trying to make it possible for pretty much anyone to be able to tell these stories as well. And so this is a screenshot of our online editor. It's a URL you go to. It's a flex environment. There's a map on there. It's drag and drop. There's some buttons to click. It's pretty easy to use. Like I said, hour or two, we'd have you up and running and you can make your own hidden historical tour no problem. The other, the piece that ties all these together is on the back end, there's just my SQL database. So there's tables and tables and tables and the editor writes to the tables and reads from the tables and so does the client software on the iPhone. So that's in a nutshell what ARIS is and then once we made it, it enabled us to carry out all these investigations using it for all our part of those. So like I teach classes where ARIS is used as a design tool to investigate the city. I create games to be played as part of the Spanish curriculum. I'll talk more about that in a minute. We host workshops for youth, for folklorists, for librarians. I don't know, all that messy stuff I was talking about before. ARIS becomes a tool that we can do those things with. And maybe one thing to interject on that is that the idea behind ARIS is that with all this messy, crazy things happening, that's really exciting to us because we don't see ARIS as an open source alternative to established software. For instance, you have open office to Microsoft Word. But as Chris mentioned earlier, mobile, we don't know what the affordances are yet. We don't, like, banning and keeping them contained is one thing to do, but it doesn't help us know what we can do with this for learning and education with this mobile technology. So it's more of a call for people to come and explore with us. So it's an enabling platform. And so now what we're going to do is describe ARIS. Now we'd like to give you a background of some key moments along the history of ARIS, and we hope it can be helpful to those of you who perhaps are involved in your own open source projects and are looking for some good ideas. Yeah, and just in general, again, so the idea being that we were doing this crazy stuff, a few of us together, and all along the way, at different moments in time, we found that the key to our success has been opening it up and bringing more people into the conversation from a variety of different areas. So this is sort of those moments. So there's four phases we'll walk through. So at the end of the beginning, it started as a class project. Visualite, who had the vision, was Dave Gagno. And there's a class professor, Kurt Squire, who also was key in helping this project have a vision and get off the ground. The initial idea was a game called Getting with Warhol, where the singer in a museum, and usually in an art class, I think what's typical is you might go there and you're supposed to look at a piece of art and know who read the plaque next to it and know who made it when they lived. We wanted to foster a more deep interaction with art, so we created an interactive story. We wanted players to come into a museum and we picked Andy Warhol exhibit, which was happening at the Milwaukee Museum at the time. And you became kind of a forest-gump character, where you were a fictionalized character in this social circle that Andy Warhol had around him. And as you went to each painting, different events would be triggered, and these characters, whoever made that painting would be a character you would interact with and discuss, and they might ask you to do things. For instance, Roy Lichtenstein asked you to deliver a Campbell Soup can to Andy Warhol. And later you might see that that became one of Andy Warhol's paintings. It's a fictional mode of making meaning around this that will make it more compelling than just seeing a static image and not really meaning anything to you. So in one semester, we, Dave Gagnon, created these spreadsheets and we constructed as we could this experiment. We learned a lot from it and decided there was something there to this project that could extend beyond the class. So then, Sean Dickers was another student who collaborated with Dave Gagnon and I to make a second experiment. We went to the Madison Capitol and we made a Da Vinci Code-like experience where we picked out different exhibits that people might not otherwise see and we created puzzles around them so that students would really have to delve deep into what they were and understand them to make progress into saving a fictional scientist called Dr. Hernandez. This was, in a way, happy to say this. It was a failure. It was a failure that we learned a lot from. We made it a huge narrative, very elaborate. There was time travel, but we learned that it just became, scope creep was huge. It was too much to manage and I think it's still yet to be played by anyone other than us. And so this really was helpful for us to shift our alignment to we just wanted to create small design experiments that people can play quickly and work from there before we make it this huge, elaborate experience that we just don't have the time or means to make. So at the end of this phase we put the open source code, we put the code of Eris out on the web. We wanted others to see it. We wanted to see what would happen if we had anything else to say about that. Just so you guys announced that at Open Education 2008. Right. That's what he has officially officially put out there. There's no turning back after announcing that anyone could take this. We adopted an MIT open source license so that anyone can still can take this code and do as they like to. So, like Chris said, put the code out there. It's legally available. One can download it, but who's going to download it? If no one even played his game other than his kids. So you have to have other people using your stuff before it can go anywhere. And with something crazy like this you have to have someone who's dumb enough to use it even though it's pretty bushly. And back in 2009 that was me. Early 2009 I'm dumb enough to hear about this Eris software that my old friends in Madison are making and decide to adopt it as my platform for creating augmented reality place-based games for Spanish curriculum. We went with a professor in Spanish and Portuguese, Dr. Julie Sykes. And we say, let's make a game that takes place in a local neighborhood. That's going to be great. What are we going to use? I looked back at the platforms I used to use as a grad student to create this kind of content and downloads were no longer available. When I came up, the grad cycles were over. There wasn't stuff out there. And found an Eris. I almost used Google sites as my game engine for going about that short. But it didn't render properly on mobile devices at the time. So I ended up using Eris and we created it in Tira. So put this game together in the spring, had a first pilot run in the summer of 2009. Ran it with a 202 class at the University of New Mexico in fall of 2009. Ran it with two classes in 2010. Right now, we're running it with all six sections of Spanish 202 as part of that curriculum. It's a murder mystery. It takes place in a nearby neighborhood. It's kind of like where in the world is Carmen San Diego, a choose your own adventure kind of story. And students actually traveled and we were going to play a game. It's been a lot of fun to work on a project. And moreover, working on that project, working on this tool and do things with it that it really wasn't ready to do. And then maybe no one else is ready to try. Push the tool forward. Push the group back in Madison forward thinking that this might actually go somewhere. It pushed me into the group. I became a member of the co-design team within about eight months of picking this thing up. Did you have a burning question? So for this game to work, do you have to go to the different places like the Madison game where this is where I can tap to say a little bit of both. And that was actually part of the ways in which I was pushing on it real hard is we wanted to give you students iPods for about a month. So we wanted to play part of the game as homework but then go to the neighborhood for part of the game. And it wasn't really meant to do that at the time. Now a year and a half later, it's great at. And that's been one of the really interesting effects of how the platform has evolved in concert with people using it. And I'm sort of the first example of that. This is the first place where we have someone sort of accessing the tool. You need to have access in order to in order to get it to go anywhere. But there's some other things that came up starting in the summer of 2010. In June 2010, there were some other developments and errors that were real important for pushing it out there. What is this editor, the shot I showed you before? This way of creating errors games didn't exist before. Before you were manually editing tables or islands. And no one else was willing to do that and could keep it straight. But putting this out in June 2010 was a big moment for us. This is usable by other people. There's also the app. Putting something out on the app store is a whole new level of access over putting something on a Google Code repository. It has lots of implications. And the app store and developing for iOS is nowhere near as closed as I imagined it was before I got into it. And even to this day people don't realize that you can release something without going through the app store. All you need is an enterprise license. So we've released it too this way at certain times. But having errors on the app store so you all can download it right now and start playing with it is a real big boom. And then the other thing is you don't want to get involved. I had a quick question. So you said for Mentira you produced it now? Oh. Currently if you want to play Mentira it's in Eris. Download Eris, search for Mentira and it'll auto correct you to mentor. You mentioned something else about enterprise. Yeah, I can talk to you later about it. It's probably a little off topic at this point. But it is more open than I imagined and easy to do. That was sort of our second phase. Putting things out there in a way that people might actually start using them. And what we experienced after that is this period of massive growth. Right. What we... So with that foundation set to help people have access to this tool we wanted. And seeing the fruits that came from this relationship with Chris and how this tool could be informed and asking for features and us able to create those features prioritize them we wanted more of that to happen. And so we thought one thing that became I think central early on as a kind of conventional wisdom that we bought into was that this all needs to be around the tool. People don't want to just go to a website or at least the project won't grow if it's just information we're putting out there. People can use and take and apply to what they're doing and that's what will keep people coming. And so how can we promote that? Up to this point we had adopted an agile programming development cycle where a lot of times we hold internal game jams where we as a team would block out a day, two days three days and just work on a feature, try making a game push the edges of this tool to make it better. We did not do this we heard of game design jams so we decided to hold a global game jam with Aris and this was one that we held we're going to have the dates on this April 18th through 20th this year huge watershed money for us. We wanted 50 games and 50 hours so we set aside three days wherever you are and we had students from K-12 schools come in and researchers and here in Madison was kind of the home base but we had 10 to 20 other bases around the country and around the world. Essentially we invited everyone we could get a hold of through our website, through our personal networks just everyone anyone who wants to come make games for three days and we wanted everyone to feel that kind of buzz and excitement of an event like this so we used Adobe Connect to have people video conference in we had people from the Netherlands a team from Spain that were also early partners and asking for features and using the tool even a 12 year old boy in Columbia who we know and said he just wanted to make some cool games he joined as well so it was a success there were I think 114 games were made total 20 of them were really showcased and playable that everyone the authors talked about at the end of the event so this graph shows represents hints to the erisgames.org website and it's interesting to see with these three events that were held around designing using the tool to see that interest just kind of grow even though it's dipping some it's gradually rising. If people can't read that line that we're just barely peaking above at the global game is 1,000 hits in a week so a pretty big growth for us in this last year in terms of number of people trying to figure out what this is about getting involved and it all seems to be organized around these public events that we know some other aspects of how we're trying to encourage community participation this is light house I don't know if anyone's used that for bug tracking or feature tracking we use that as a front end for people who are not coding on the project but want to give feedback as to what needs to be fixed and what could be better so we've been using that for the last several months internally we use Pivotal Tracker to keep track of all the things that need to get done and to prioritize features and stuff like that those have both been really good tools to talk to each other really well that we made use of another thing that's happened in this last year is we've been partnering with fairly large organizations museums that want us to design a co-design and experience with them other museums who want to run youth design and want us to help with that other people who are interested in trying to figure out how to do something with both mobile media and local place let's say in terms of sustainability financially has been effective so far is that these organizations have access to the tool so they could in theory take it and just run with it but what they wanted is expertise around the tool and so they've said we will give you this block of money for we're hoping to get these features and we'd also love you to come out for a few days and maybe help us run a workshop help us all get on board and understand the process of designing and and we'll go from there and who knows maybe your relationship will happen after that or maybe we'll just say that's great and go on our separate ways but yeah so just a quick view back in at GLS 2011 we did a snapshot of how many games players and editors that were last night we did the same thing and those figures have roughly doubled in the last four months we've seen huge uptake in the amount of people in this platform these are the last these are the heirs games that have been played last month we have six games that have had 50 unique people play them in the last month and here of course being used in a classroom it's way at the top of the list there's a 12 games over 25 players so this classic sort of long tail picture 302 games have been played by two or more people in the last month we couldn't have imagined this many people actually sort of engaging with the platform a year ago so pretty amazing for us we're entering into a new period where there's a lot of excitement we're having a lot of fun doing this kind of stuff and it's getting big and it's getting complicated and this is where we're maybe looking for advice from anyone around here is how do we put together some sort of formal structure that makes things like legal stuff like paying for t-shirts like you know just all that crap easy and doable without ruining all the fun that we're having so we don't know if it's a nonprofit we don't know if it's LLC we don't know how to manage those things also with sort of trying to keep in mind the idea of very loose ownership that we have around both this product and these ideas right now we really like to maintain those some other things we want to try and we know development programmers making these features is a bottleneck often and there are now more features than we have programmers to handle so how do we hire enough developers to work on these things what kind of a structure has worked to some extent within our university structure but it's starting to get so big that it doesn't really quite fit within university so how do we get enough programmer house where it's not necessarily you pay for a feature and we give it to you it's a larger community that is flexible so I definitely encourage you all to both give us free advice and to join our community start making games, start talking to us about what you would like to make anything else Chris? well let's open up for questions so like I'm trying to see like how's the sustainability like this is an awesome free service like I'm really excited to try to make my own game I might be even more excited if I could take my own game and then put it on the app store you can release ari5 with the exact same code based on the app store tomorrow under the MIT license interesting so I could re-change this like material part 2 I could release in the app store I love that that doesn't worry you you're not concerned as long as you're not as long as you're not piercing that would just make it hurt in my soul nothing against piercing but it doesn't feel fair competing with the little guys interesting why have you chosen not to take some of your why have you not been done with material or other games? oh because so material was sort of released just not through the app store as its own app without a game picker as a sort of a forked version of ari5 and there have been a couple other examples of those kinds of things basically it's just that eras got a whole bunch of new features that I wanted to use and I don't have the money or time to worry about how to shoot out that little bit of code to the app store and actually a good example of that it could happen let me see if I can skip that these were extra slides that we might and we might not get to these are all the crazy things we're going to try this year we know we're going to make apps go off when you complete your games we're going to connect to web apps anyway yeah and just to to finish this point on how you could create your own app WeBird is an app that was created using eras software but it's actually an app that a professor is making and is going to be independent where you can collect you're outside you can record a bird call and with 99.9% accuracy it'll show you the bird you're listening to that can feed into science databases to inform so it's a form of civic engagement or citizen science rather so we're done having to talk to people later though are you doing a poster thing this afternoon we're not we'll be there though congratulations congratulations for the presentation